Saturday, September 30, 2017

Elusiveness

Mural on the Lower East Side

"Part of why I love New York so deeply is exactly this elusiveness. This refusal to be caught is what allows it to carry such fantasy, mystery and myth, yet also be home. It is simultaneously no one's city and everyone's city."
Becky Cooper, Mapping Manhattan

Friday, September 29, 2017

New Faces



"Every day there were new faces arriving in the city, drugged with dreams. Nothing would stop New York."
Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

Thursday, September 28, 2017

New York View

East 42nd Street

"You should also, sweetheart, as I have said before, COME TO NEW YORK. It is so healthy to be somewhere where the view always changes without your having to move."
Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Hell of a Place



"I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend's a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place."
Richard Price, Lush Life

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Fulfillment



"It was to this city, whenever I went home, that I always knew I must return, for it was mistress of one's wildest hopes, protector of one's deepest privacies. It was half insane with its noise, violence, and decay, but it gave one the tender security of fulfillment."
Willie Morris, Yazoo

Monday, September 25, 2017

Faster and Safer



"What I love about New York: the faster and more recklessly my cab driver drives the safer and all around better I feel."
Gregor Collins, The Accidental Caregiver

Sunday, September 24, 2017

Hurried Friendliness

Fifth Avenue (Pexels)

"That was the nice thing about New York, the wonderful thing — that everybody was busy and everybody let everybody else alone, and still, everybody was friendly and kind in a hurried way and without making much fuss about it or thinking anything of it."
Curt Riess, High Stakes

Saturday, September 23, 2017

Capital Assets



"The sun might set over Manhattan as it might set over Mt. Kilimanjaro, over Lake Titicacca, or over the Khyber Pass. But only over Manhattan did it set in reflections of gold for which there were capital assets to match."
Russell Bittner, Trompe-l'oeil

Friday, September 22, 2017

Small Things

North Williamsburg

"For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier. Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence. These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to."

Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Thursday, September 21, 2017

Sultry



"New York streets are distinctly sultry—especially in Harlem. The defining sights and smells are those that humans make. The eye-catching colors of shop signs, of awnings, of advertisements. The scent of meat being grilled, of ladies' powdery perfumes, of sour body odor—all this mixing with the cabbagey smell of garbage hovering on the street curbs."
Suzanne Rindell, Three-Martini Lunch

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Lonely



"New York is such a lonely place
Everyone in such a rush
To go where?
None of us really knows
They all are just going so quickly."
Larry T. Newcomb, As Am I

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

New York is Waiting

United Nations Building


"Skyscrapers and subways and stations
Staring up at the United Nations
New York is waiting for you and me, baby
Waiting to swallow us down
New York, we're coming to see what you're made of
Are you as great as you sound."
Alice Cooper, Big Apple Dreamin'

Monday, September 18, 2017

New York Look

Lower East Side

"New Yorkers want to look they're on the verge of death 24/7. To achieve this look, they make sure their skin resembles that of a corpse and flaunt their malnourished figure proudly. 'No, honey, this body was not brought to you by exercise and kale."
Ryan O'Connell, Thought Catalog

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Electric Hum

Madison and 42nd


"The thing about living in New York City is that it's never really quiet. It's like when there's a television on in the next room and you know it's on, because you can feel the electric hum of it. To live in a place like this is to live in the middle of an electric hum that never stops."
Rob Hart, New Yorked

Saturday, September 16, 2017

Araby



"I have always lived in New York, but a good part of my life I longed for the city the way someone in a small town would, yearning to arrive at the capital. Growing up in the Bronx was like growing up in a village. From earliest adolescence I knew there was a center-of-the-world, and that I was far from it. At the same time, I also knew it was only a subway ride away, downtown in Manhattan. Manhattan was Araby."
Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City

Friday, September 15, 2017

Manhattan Promise

Roosevelt Island and Manhattan skyline

"From this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promisethat you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving."
Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

Thursday, September 14, 2017

Transcendent City

Oculus

"New York soared and carried the spirits of every man and woman with it. It was a city that said Look up! A vertical city, a transcendent city that set the mind on higher thoughts."
Brendan Mathews, The World of Tomorrow

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

New York Event



"She stood on the corner, waiting for the light to change. In New York, even this was an event. She loved the way no one in the city stayed on the sidewalk during a red light. No matter how old or how young, everyone moved out into the street, impatient, looking for an edge."
Brian Morton, Florence Gordon

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Unrecognizable

Mosaic in Union Square


"Don't even get me started on gentrification. There were twenty-one Starbucks within a three-block radius of the building I worked in. Recording studios, film labs, and record stores were dying, if not already vacant corpses turned cupcake shops or blow-dry bars. They had stopped playing music videos on MTV and had banned smoking in bars. I didn't recognize New York anymore."
Renee Carlino, Before We Were Strangers

Monday, September 11, 2017

September 11

Liberty Park

"I live in New York City. I could never live anywhere else. The events of September 11 forced me to confront the fact that no matter what, I live here and always will."
Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck

Sunday, September 10, 2017

Mutation

American Museum of Natural History

"New York is a mutation masquerading as a modernization. What is presented as modern is actually, in many respects, deeply archaic, but we are conditioned by our nineteenth-century intellectual heritage to think that  whatever comes later must be better adapted, more fit, more highly evolved than what it replaces. It's here, therefore it must be fit."
Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York

Saturday, September 9, 2017

Friday, September 8, 2017

So Much Love

Williamsburg

"She loved New York so much she couldn't bear the thought of it going on without her."
Bill Hayes, Insomniac City

Thursday, September 7, 2017

Build Your Future

Statue of Liberty and Liberty Island

"New York has always been a magnet for people from literally all over the world. People are drawn to New York because this is a place that you can stake your claim, you can build a future, you can dream your dreams."
Hillary Clinton, New York Senate Debate

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Fast and Loud

Times Square (Pixabay)

"Oh, New York is such a grand old place
The tempo is fast and loud
And trouble attracts a crowd
And the dirty streets are some disgrace in old New York."
Richard Bimonte, Yankee Ingenuity

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Living Too Long in New York

Kent Avenue


"Living too long in New York does that to a girl, gives her the false sense that the world is full of interesting people. Or at least people who are crazy in an interesting way."
Maria Semple, Today Will Be Different

Monday, September 4, 2017

Locus of Capitalism

Time Warner Center

"Manhattan is the primary locus of global capitalism, the most voracious force for change in history. Best to pick a different place to try to render fixed and solid that which inexorably melts into air."

Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic

Sunday, September 3, 2017

Gross and Strange



"He did what any real New Yorker would: ignore the gross and strange, because in a city like this, it was the only thing there was."
Molly Prentiss, Tuesday Nights in 1980

Saturday, September 2, 2017

Odd Duck

Times Square subway station

"I wasn't an 'odd duck' in New York, the city that accommodates or ignores all ducks."
Siri Hustvedt, Yonder

Friday, September 1, 2017

Amusement Park

Luna Park


"21st-century New York is nothing but an amusement park for the world's wealthy and their children. It has ceased to be a real place for the rest of us."
Shane Ferro, Business Insider